Religion Dispatches
…plugged-in lifestyle doesn’t really get at the heart of the issue. I think the Amish, of all people, have it right. It’s not so much about what you as an individual are doing or not doing, as the effect technology has on the community: Why not make life easier and just put [a phone] in the house? “What would that lead to?” another Amish man asked me. “We don’t want to be the kind of people who will interrupt a conversation at home to answer a tel…
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…ntenders for New Testament inclusion—the Gospel of Peter, for example—they can scan through the Early Christian Writings online database. The sticky problem for Christians, as with Muslims, is authority. With individual access to a host of early Christian texts, and inspired by Brown to question the New Testament’s authority, what should people believe? Today’s Christians must decide for themselves which texts “should” have been included in the Ne…
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…e Northeast, tends to be white, tends to be older, tends to support Republican candidates, and there’s another one that has a center of gravity more in the Southwest—we now have five states that have majority Latino Catholics in those states—and that tends to be younger, and leans heavily toward Democratic presidential candidates. Will the Roman Catholic Church ever become two churches in reality? Already there are threats of a schism if progressi…
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…and ever has. Their music ventured to the outer limits of the American musical canon, seamlessly fusing uniquely American musical genres into something entirely new. In memorializing Jerry Garcia, Bob Dylan lauded his friend’s virtuosity in American music: “There are a lot of spaces and advances between the Carter family, Buddy Holly and, say, Ornette Coleman, a lot of universes, but he filled them all without being a member of any school.” Cultur…
Read More…giveness for the living people who suffer harm. So in the afterglow or aftermath of Francis’ historic visit, the most important take-away may be the old sinner in the white cap who captured so many eyes and hearts here in the US—who reminded us that like him, the church itself is only human….
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…lp young people to accept their own bodies and to avoid the pretension “to cancel out sexual difference because one no longer knows how to deal with it”. In Section 293, the pope reports that his bishops discussed their treatment of folks who are in civil—not sacramental—marriages or simply co-habitating. The bishops decided that it is preferable to try to make nice-nice with those couples only because they might eventually be enticed to convert t…
Read More…t to the west moves east to encounter the Coconino Plateau (7000’) and the San Francisco Peaks (13,000’+) the hot air off the desert and the cool air of the high mountains cause thunderstorms to form. These storms move from the southwest to the northeast right toward the Hopi reservation in north-central Arizona. The weather pattern, called the ‘monsoon’ in Arizona, is predictable (monsoon actually comes from the Arabic word for season). Arizona’s…
Read More…r’s square. Religion News Service reports that several bishops, including “San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone – point man or the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ battle against gay marriage – had written a letter to the Vatican on their behalf.” A group of LGBT Catholics from London who met up with the New Ways group received a blessing from British Cardinal Vincent Nichols. “I feel that the positive reaction that we have been getti…
Read More…Party. One who did vote for the marriage bill is the conservative Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions secretary. Smith, a Catholic, had been expected to abstain, but reportedly voted for the measure out of loyalty to Cameron. Smith was quickly un-invited as a keynote speaker at the seventh World Congress of Families conference, which is scheduled for Sydney, Australia in May. The letter telling Smith he was no longer welcome says the bill h…
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…ts. Her dual conversions straddled the national convergence of the evangelical and Catholic anti-abortion movements into a powerful new alliance. In 1994, prominent Catholics and evangelicals signed the “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” declaration, putting aside their theological differences to created a unified political front against abortion. The newly energized anti-abortion movement went on the offensive, pushing measures designed to chi…
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